New Registration and Sign-in for FamilySearch Websites

FamilySearch, the genealogical organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is moving towards using a unified sign-in system for all of their Websites. This change will allow users to have the same user name and password, not only for all FamilySearch Websites, but for other general LDS Church Websites as well. Because some of the sites have information specific to members of the Church, there are two basic systems; an "LDS Account" for those who are Church members and a "FamilySearch account" for the general public. This bifurcated system has been in place for the FamilySearch.org Website for many years. LDS members who registered and signed-in to FamilySearch.org were able to access Temple Ordinance information not generally available to other users of the Website.

This system has already been introduced on the FamilySearch Wiki Website as well as a few others. The system will ultimately require that LDS members register with an LDS Account and use that sign-in only for all the Websites. The Church defines an LDS Account as follows:

LDS Account is the sign in credentials (user name and password) that most LDS Church Web sites require you to have to access their site. The LDS Church is in the process of transitioning most of its sites and applications to LDS Account in order to reduce the number of user names and passwords you are required to have.

It is important to emphasize that this new program in no way limits those who are not members of the Church from having access to all of the Church's genealogical data, with the sole exception of the LDS specific ordinances. In fact, when the program is fully implemented, the general public will have access to New FamilySearch as well.